It was generally the Curé or the Mayor of the bombarded towns that had rounded up each little parentless army and headed it toward Paris. When the larger children were themselves again they all told the same bitter monotonous stories. Suddenly a rain of shrapnel fell on their village or town. They fled to the cellars, perhaps to the one Cave Voûtée (a stone cellar with vaulted roof) and there herded in indescribable filth, darkness, fear, hunger for weeks and even months at a time. The shelling of a village soon stopped, but in the larger towns, strategic points desired of the enemy, the bombarding would be incessant. Mothers, or older children, would venture out for food, returning perhaps with enough to keep the pale flame of life alive, as often as not falling a huddled mass a few feet from the exit of the cellar. Mothers died of typhoid, pneumonia, in childbirth; others never had reached the cellar with their own children in the panic; one way or another these children arrived in Paris in a state of orphanhood, although later investigations proved them to have been hiding close to their mother (and sometimes father; for all men are not physically fit for war) by the width of a street, in a town where the long roar of guns dulled the senses and the affections, and the constant hail of shrapnel precluded all search for anything but food.
Moreover, many families had fled from villages lying in the path of the advancing hordes to the neighboring towns, and there separated, crowding into the nearest Caves Voûtées. Most of these poor women carried a baby and were distraught with fear besides; the older children must cling to the mother's skirts or become lost in the mêlée.
When one considers that many of these children, in Rheims or Verdun, for instance, were in cellars not for weeks but for months, without seeing the light of day, with their hunger never satisfied, with corpses unburied for days until a momentary lull encouraged the elders to remove the sand bags at the exit and thrust them out, with their refuge rocking constantly and their ear-drums splitting with raucous sounds, where the stenches were enough to poison what red blood they had left and there were no medicines to care for the afflicted little bodies, one pities anew those mentally afflicted people who assert at automatic intervals, "I can't see any difference between the cruelty of the British blockade and the German submarines." The resistant powers of the human body, given the bare chance of remaining alive, are little short of phenomenal. But then, when Nature compounded the human frame it was to fling it into a newborn world far more difficult to survive than even the awful conditions of modern warfare.
Some of these children were wounded before they reached the cellars. In many cases the families remained in their homes until the walls, at first pierced by the shrapnel, began to tumble about their ears. Then they would run to the homes of friends on the other side of the town, staying there until the guns, aided by the air scouts, raked such houses as had escaped the first assault. Often there were no Caves Voûtées in the villages. The mothers cowered with their children under the tottering walls or lay flat on the ground until the German guns turned elsewhere; then they ran for the nearest town. But during these distracted transfers many received wounds whose scars they are likely to carry through life. The most seriously wounded were taken to the military hospitals, where they either died, or, if merely in need of bandages, were quickly turned out to make room for some poilu arriving in the everlasting procession of stretchers.
Sometimes, flat on their stomachs, the more curious and intelligent of the children watched the shells sailing overhead to drop upon some beautiful villa or château and transpose it into a heap of stones. Where there were English or Americans in these bombarded towns, or where the Curés or the Mayors of those invaded had not been shot or imprisoned, the children were sent as quickly as possible to Paris, the mothers, when there were any, only too content to let them go and to remain behind and take their chances with the shells.
One little Belgian named Bonduelle, who, with two brothers, reached Paris in safety, is very graphic: "We are three orphans," he replied in answer to the usual questions. "Our uncle and aunt took the place of our dear parents, so soon taken from us.... It was towards the evening of Wednesday, 6th September, 1914, that I was coming back to my uncle's house from Ypres, when all at once I heard shrieks and yells in the distance. I stopped, for I was like one stunned. On hearing behind me, on the highway, German cavalry, I ran into a house where I spent the night. I could not close my eyes when I thought of the anxiety of my uncle and aunt and of the fate of my two small brothers, Michael and Roger. Early the following day I rushed to our house. Everybody was in the cellar. We shed tears on meeting again. I found two of my cousins wounded by a shell which had exploded outside our door. Soon another shell comes and smashes our house. I was wounded. Dazed with fear, my cousin and myself got out through a window from the cellar, we ran across fields and meadows to another uncle, where the rest of the family followed us soon. We remained there the whole winter, but what a sad winter! We have not taken off our clothes, for at every moment we feared to have to run away again.
"The big guns rumbled very much and the shells whistled over our heads. Every one heard: 'So-and-so is killed' or 'wounded, by a shell.' 'Such-and-such-a-house is ruined by a shell.'
"After having spent more than seven months in incredible fear, my brothers and myself have left the village, at the order of the gendarmes, and the English took us to Hazebrouck, from where we went to Paris."
In some cases the parents, or, as was most generally the case, the mother, after many terrifying experiences in her village, passed and repassed by the Germans, having heard of the relief stations in Paris, sent their children, properly tagged, to be cared for in a place of comparative safety until the end of the war. Young Bruno Van Wonterghem told his experience in characteristically simple words:
"Towards the evening of September 6th, 1914, the Germans arrived at our village with their ammunition. One would have thought the Last Judgment was about to begin. All the inhabitants were hiding in their houses. I was hiding in the attic, but, desirous to see a German, I was looking through a little window in the roof. Nobody in the house dared to go to bed. It was already very late when we heard knocks at the door of our shop. It was some Germans who wanted to buy chocolate. Some paid but the majority did not. They left saying, 'Let us kill the French.' The following morning they marched away toward France. In the evening one heard already the big guns in the distance.